Listen up, people! Donald Trump wants to get something off his chest. The US President wants the people to know he’s not a dictator!
Traditionally, he who helms the United States of America is also universally recognised as the leader of the free world. Naturally, you wouldn’t think someone in such a position would have to point out they’re not a dictator.
Yet that’s exactly what Trump did while recently speaking in the Oval Office.
The Guardian reports that Trump announced out of the blue, “I’m not a dictator. I don’t like a dictator.”
It’s a strange thing to say and perhaps a case of the President doth protest too much.
After all, the commander in chief has recently been in the firing line for deploying armed troops on the streets of the capital, threatening to withhold billions of funding from universities, suing media outlets, and threatening any opposition with prosecution and treason.
It has to be said that these are all very dictatorial-like things to do. As is making millions of dollars for your nearest and dearest while Rome burns.
It gets worse!
On the big man’s birthday, which, in one of those weird twists of fate, coincides with the 250th anniversary of the creation of the US army, Trump ordered a military parade through Washington, and he apparently threw a tantrum that the troops weren’t sufficiently “menacing.”
How dictatorial is that?
There’s more!
Only recently, Trump demanded a giant banner of his fierce and unforgiving face draped over the capital’s Department of Labor building with the slogan, “American workers first.”
Talk about telling us how you admire North Korea without telling us you’re obsessed with North Korea.
Donald Trump may not think he’s a dictator, but there’s no shortage of people lining up to question the narrative.
When asked if they believe Trump is a dictator, Kim Lane Scheppele, a professor of sociology at Princeton University, who knows a thing or two about power-crazed tyrants, answered, “Yes, of course.”
She added, “If I was hesitating to use the term ‘dictatorship’ before, it’s this mobilization of the national guard and the indication that he plans to overtake resistance by force that now means we’re in it.”
Donald “I’m not a dictator” Trump is apparently growing more and more emboldened every passing day by a sycophantic Republican Party. He’s reportedly toying with the idea of sending troops to Democratic-run cities such as Chicago and San Francisco just to flex his muscles and show the world how a man who definitely isn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, a dictator, behaves!
Scheppele added, “He’s really planning a military, repressive force, to go out into the streets of the places that are most likely to resist his dictatorship and to just put down the whole thing by force.”
Oddly, most modern-day dictators like Putin and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan are keen to go out of their way not to look like a stereotypical dictator. Trump, on the other hand, seems keen to tick all the boxes while telling everyone he’s not a dictator.
In many ways, it’s the ultimate dictatorial thing to do and a massive power play. He knows we know he’s lying, and he simply doesn’t care!
